Kushinagar, Mau lead with 39 percent polling in six hours in UP

Lucknow: Hundreds of thousands of people from Kushinagar and Mau districts in Uttar Pradesh cast their votes in the first six hours of the penultimate sixth phase of the assembly elections, polling 39 and 36 per cent respectively, an Election Commission official said.

Over 1.72 crore voters from 49 constituencies will decide the fate of 635 candidates

Till 1 pm., 35 per cent voting was reported from Ballia, 33 per cent from Maharajganj and Deoria, and 32 per cent from Gorakhpur.

Azamgarh, the Lok Sabha constituency of Samajwadi Party patron Mulayam Singh Yadav recorded the lowest turnout of 34 per cent. The SP patriarch did not campaign in this constituency.

Meanwhile the second highest turnout of voters were seen in Mau where mafia don turned politician Mukhtaar Ansari was fielded by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

Over 1.72 crore voters from 49 constituencies will decide the fate of 635 candidates, of whom 175 are fighting independently.

There are several interesting contests in the phase as Swamy Prasad Maurya of the Bahujan Samaj Party, Surya Pratap Shahi, BJP, Shyam Bahadur Yadav, SP and others battle it out.

While Maurya is contesting from Padrauna, former state Bharatiya Janata Party chief Surya Pratap Shahi is fighting from Pathardeva.

Maximum number of candidates are in Gorakhpur city where 127 candidates are in fray for its nine seats, while the minimum number of candidates – seven – are in Mohammadabad Gohna seat in Mau.